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The afternoon session on day 2 of the ISSSMC saw a fascinating session on ‘peaking’ – the art/science* of reaching your best performances at the right time of the season. In keeping with the multi-disciplinary nature of the conference, we saw talks from both a world leading sports nutritionist and an equally world class physiologist/coach, topped off with an insight into the experiences of one of the UKs leading athletics coaches.
*there’s more than a little of both necessary and perhaps a little luck as well!
Peaking at the right time: nutrition strategies. Prof Louise Burke
Professor Burke works for the Australian Institute of Sport and is one of the world leaders in sports nutrition. Describing her early career, starting out providing dietary advice for Aussie rules footballers, charting the growing sophistication in the way she worked with athletes as the field and knowledge of sports nutrition grew. Louise then described the framework she works with now
Guiding principles
- What are the nutritional demands of the athlete’s specific training load?
- What are the demands of the event that must be built into the athlete’s physiology
Within this framework, any nutrition intervention or dietary plan must be periodised, specific, individualised and care must be taken to ensure successful integration and interaction with the ‘bigger picture’ – good sports nutrition is not an aim in itself, it is there to support the performance of the athlete.
Professor Burke gave some examples of how this approach is applied in practise
Fat adaptation diet – one nutritional intervention that has received support recently involves 5 days of a high fat diet followed by one day carb-loading, the idea being that this teaches your body to utilise fats and spare CHO. This aim has been shown to be achieved in the lab – followers of this diet did indeed use less glycogen in a given exercise bout. However, further work showed no performance improvement, in some cases even a performance decrease. Changes in fuel utilisation are essentially useless without a performance gain so steer well clear of this strategy!
Train low – the idea here is to manipulate your glycogen stores so that some training sessions are performed in a partially depleted state. This can be achieved in many ways;
- 2 a days – training twice in a day means the 2nd session is performed in a depleted state
- Decreased dietary CHO – a low carb diet will prevent full replenishment of your CHO stores
- Pre-breakfast training – makes use of your overnight fast (while asleep)
- Limit CHO during or post training – although be careful to ensure supplies are sufficient to maintain quality of both the session and subsequent recovery.
Again there is promising research on this strategy on promoting adaptation to exercise. However, once again, there are some major downsides – attempting to perform high intensity training with low glycogen stores will limit your power outputs and from a more general health viewpoint, low glycogen stores go hand in hand with reduced immune system function and puts you at greater risk of infection. With that in mind the ‘train low’ strategy may be beneficial when employed in endurance focussed blocks but is certainly best avoided once specific race preparation begins.
Peaking at the right time: an integrated program for athletes. Dr Inigo Mujika
Dr Inigo Mujika is the world leader on peaking and tapering, with both a tremendous contribution to academia but also vast experience in an applied setting, having worked for the AIS, the Euskaltel Euskadi cycling team, Athletic Bilbao football club as well as being a world class swimming and triathlon coach! Dr Mujika’s presentation focused on his findings on applying mathematical modelling techniques to predict optimal tapering. Some of the key points:
1.) Some general recommendations for constructing a taper (of course what’s best for an individual will vary – use your experience here!)
- Maintain intensity
- Reduce volume by ~41-60%
- Maintain frequency
- Two weeks long
- Progressive (gradual decrease in load rather than a sudden drop)
2.) Deliberate overreaching for a training cycle building towards a competition can lead to improved performance BUT this must be matched by an extended taper to negate the extra fatigue.
3.) Worth consideration is a ‘two-phase’ taper – an example of how this may work is a 10 day taper followed by 5 days hard training and then a further 5 day taper up to race day. One of the problems with a long taper is the common feeling of staleness reported by athletes as they approach their race. This may be worth pursuing if this is a problem you have previously faced.
Peaking for multi-event competition. Tony Minichiello.
The session was wrapped up by a talk by Tony Minichiello outlining some of the detail that went into coaching Jess Ennis to heptathlon world championship gold in Berlin. It was fascinating to see how many of the concepts outlined by the scientists were included in Ennis’ program – the world’s top coaches know what’s important in producing peak performances and often the science just confirms what the coaches and athletes have been doing for years! There really is no substitute for experience and learning what is best for YOU. |
